Crying for Help by Casey Watson Page A

anxious face – which now seemed very childlike – I reached an arm around her shoulder and drew her in towards me. She responded by throwing her own arms around me and hugging me so tight she nearly squeezed all the breath out of me.
    ‘Oh, Casey,’ she said, letting me breathe again finally. ‘Thanks. Thanks so much for listening. My mum never listened to me, ever .’
    I could have said ‘I’m sure she did’, but I didn’t know that to be true, and I didn’t want to trot out platitudes. It wasn’t as if there was a relationship that could be rebuilt here. That was the tragedy. And it was also important that she work through all the issues she had around her mother. I had no idea what sort of a mother she had been, after all. So instead I just speculated. ‘Perhaps it just seemed that way, because she was trying to make light of it. Like I said –’
    ‘I don’t mean just about that. I mean everything . Like when her boyfriends would touch me up. She never listened. She wouldn’t listen. Des. He was the first. Used to come up – just like that – and squeeze my boobs. And when I told Mum she just laughed. I hated him.’
    I felt an all too familiar sense of dismay. ‘Did you tell anyone else?’
    ‘Not at first. Later, yes, lots. With the next one, I did. But not at first. Not with Des.’
    The next one? Oh, God … ‘But that’s serious, Sophia. Are you sure? I mean, are you sure he was doing it deliberately?’ I felt a fool for even asking. But this was a potentially serious matter. And I had Mike’s words of caution now fixed in my mind.
    ‘Of course I’m sure. How can you do something like that by accident?’
    ‘And your mum didn’t do anything?’
    ‘I told you. She just said I was being silly. So I just decided in the end that I would make his life hell instead.’ Her expression hardened. ‘I thought if she wasn’t going to get rid of him, I would. I just moaned about him all the time, saying how mean he was to me, and I’d refuse to eat when he was there till in the end he stopped eating with us. And they’d argue about me all the time, and he’d get mad, and in the end she threw him out. Good riddance!’
    ‘But afterwards,’ I said. ‘Did you tell her the truth afterwards?’
    Her features changed radically, even as I watched. ‘Oh no, I didn’t need to. It was lovely again without Des. Just me and Mum, together. Girls together. We used to stay up late, watching chick flicks and eating popcorn … Or reading girly mags together, no men to bother us. It was so lovely …’
    She seemed almost lost in her own little world now, and I wondered if all these revelations had been triggered by the prospect of seeing her mother again. I couldn’t begin to imagine how hard that must be for a child. Your only parent effectively dead, and yet you had to keep going back … seeing her lying there … just awful. The poor, poor kid. She’d started to cry now, I noticed.
    And then her voice changed again, her lip curling. ‘Didn’t fucking last, though, did it?’ I could feel her body stiffening now beside me. ‘Oh, no, I wasn’t enough for her, was I? Never enough. She was man mad, my lovely mother.’ She looked sharply at me now. ‘D’you know, she’d only been seeing Steve a week when she moved him in!’
    ‘So he came to live with you after Des, then?’
    She nodded. ‘After a week, that was all!’
    ‘This was the “next one” you were talking about then?’
    Her sudden laugh made me jump. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, still looking at me but now through me. ‘And the last. You know what that bastard did?’
    I didn’t need to answer. She seemed on autopilot now, the tears streaming down her face unchecked. I took hold of her hand as she spoke. ‘He tried to rape me. He waited till my dear mother had gone out to a parents’ evening – a parents’ evening, can you believe it? I was just sitting in my room, doing my homework, listening to music, when in he came. And he